Robert Williamsis Mr. Bitchin’, pure and simple. He’s the balls-to-the-walls fine artist whose skill and style broke down traditional fine art and opened up an entire new genre, now identified as Pop Surrealism, conceptual realism, and by the term Williams himself coined, “lowbrow.” And Williams is an example of the American Dream gone slightly askew, as dreams in the latter 20th century were inclined to do.

Tanem Davidson’s New Brow: Contemporary Underground Art presents a through line for the development of this uniquely American genre of painting which burst out of Abstract Expressionism through the Pop Art’s screened realism into a chrome flecked, hyper-sexualized, fuel-injected dream state. The icons of childhood–Rat Fink, hot rods, movie monsters, robots, toys, cartoons–conjoin in transgressive, illicit intercourse with tikis, animals, dead presidents, dollar signs, slogans, guns, girls, raw meat, and bombs; characters live in their own universes fraught with action and symbols, caught in moments just before, just after Something Happened.